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Google to strengthen AdWords intelligence with Feefo partnership

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By John McCarthy

Google has partnered with online reviews company Feefo to bolster its AdWords network with the incomer’s review-based advertising expertise.

Feefo, which works with the likes of Next, Vauxhall, Expedia and Thomas Cook, will lean on its sentiment analysis tech to discover relevant advertising keywords from the thousands of brand reviews it processes. These can then be input into digital ads where it boasts ‘up to a three or four-fold increase in click-through-rates (CTR)’ against conventional means.

Adrian Blockus, head of channel sales for the UK and Ireland at Google, explained: “We’re pleased to have Feefo on board as a Google partner. Feefo has the product knowledge, advanced technology and insight needed, to create and optimise Google AdWords campaigns for their customers.”

The keywords drawn out by Feefo can also be used to spruce up brand copy and landing pages to reflect the language and sentiment used by consumers in their reviews.

Matt West, chief revenue officer of Feefo, added: “We use our unique insights to lend a powerfully persuasive new voice to adverts.

“We are focused on using the power of our smart innovative technology to extract the maximum possible value from consumer feedback on behalf of our clients, and remain committed to helping consumers make confident, informed decisions based on real reviews they can trust.”

Feature Image Credit: Google AdWords bolstered by Feefo

By John McCarthy

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Why The Guardian believes its app can convert avid readers into paying subscribers

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By Ian Burrell

The Guardian is developing a two-tier digital model aimed at driving thousands of its most avid readers who currently do not pay for its journalism towards an enhanced and increasingly distinct service for which they will pay a monthly fee.

The strategy, set out to The Drum by Caspar Llewellyn Smith, editor of The Guardian’s digital platforms, will enable the publisher to continue its tradition of open publishing, and will rely on offering a superior user experience, rather than putting any content behind a paywall.

The plan is focused on The Guardian’s premium app, which costs £5.99 per month ($6.99 in the US). The platform introduced two new features last week, ‘Live’ and ‘Discover’, offering new ways to consume the title’s news stories and its longer reads. Neither service – regarded internally as The Guardian’s equivalent to Twitter and Instagram – is currently available to users of the free Guardian app.

The Guardian will re-position the premium app in September with the introduction of a range of new features. This will be backed by a marketing campaign aimed at transitioning more of the Guardian’s global audience of 150 million monthly browsers to paying users.

“In the autumn we will be thinking about how we get people to move from being just web users into the app and then maybe moving them on to becoming premium app users,” says Llewellyn Smith. As part of the strategy, a live sports feed will be introduced in the premium app in time for next month’s World Cup.

He says that less than 10% of the Guardian’s 2.7 million app users are currently paying for the premier service. “With the app, frankly the big metric is how many people are going to start paying for it,” he explains.

A changing product

In time, The Guardian’s paid app service and its website could look quite different.

“It depends on how much money it makes,” says Llewellyn Smith. “Does the app begin to develop a slightly different identity from the website and the two start to serve slightly different audiences? Hitherto they have been essentially the same thing. [Is] this is an audience that we know better and are there some bits of our journalism that they might be more interested in than the general reader of the website?”

Since mid-January when it relaunched its print paper in tabloid format, The Guardian has been focusing hard on its app audience, which engages with content on average 2.1 times a day, compared to 1.3 for mobile web readers. Almost half the app audience is in the UK (41%), with 14% in the US, 7% in Australia and 38% in the rest of the world.

The strategy dovetails with the Guardian’s donations policy, introduced in dire financial straits in 2016, whereby it requests financial help from readers in support of its open publishing model; a ploy which, The Drum revealed, has seen 800,000 donors, subscribers and members hand over cash.

Llewellyn Smith says that number has grown “significantly” in the past seven months. Campaigning investigative stories on the data firm Cambridge Analytica and the scandalous treatment of children of the Windrush immigrants, and in-depth coverage of the gender pay gap in British business, have delivered spikes in donations.

“The pleasing news for Guardian journalists is that the journalism that we feel proudest of and feel that we are here to produce is the stuff that motivates people to pay,” he says.

Supporters, not members

Guardian News and Media, which publishes The Guardian and The Observer, reported losses of £19m for the year to the end of March 2018, meaning it is ahead of its targets to break even by next April. The company has not been in the black since 1998 but Llewellyn Smith, who is also The Guardian’s head of culture, looks forward to the day when it has profits to reinvest in journalism.

The Guardian’s Scott Trust ownership structure has meant it has always been unique in news publishing but its reader relationship model is increasingly distinct from that of rivals. While the concept of ‘membership’ is taking hold in the news industry, Llewellyn Smith says The Guardian, which once embraced that terminology, is now “retiring that language around membership” in preference for using the word ‘supporter’.

While publishers with paywalls market their subscription offerings as transactions that give exclusive access, there is an altruistic element in The Guardian’s pitch to supporters. “We are just thinking how can we make those super loyal readers love the product even more, but clearly we are at the same time saying to them that by paying you are helping to keep the rest of it free for other people,” he says.

Readers can be ‘supporters’ by making recurring donations or buying the paper, but signing up for the premium app will be marketed as “the best way you can read the Guardian”, he explains, while adding that all forms of financial backing from users are welcome.

Digital focus

The Guardian’s app strategy is helped by its continued focus on digital innovation, aided by its new £42m GMG Ventures venture capital project, which in turn is supported from the paper’s endowment fund. Investments have been made in ten startups, including those developing technology tools for journalism in areas such as block chain, artificial intelligence and big data. Some of these startups are working outside of media but have valuable specialisms ranging from customer experience expertise to online learning and recruitment innovation, including diversity concepts.

GMG Ventures, says Llewellyn Smith, has enabled The Guardian to appraise itself of latest insights in areas such as text to voice technology and the use of augmented reality, even at a time when the wider business has been heavily cutting costs. “We are seeing some incredibly interesting companies and it’s helping expose people like me and the digital teams to huge amounts of innovation.”

Some of this learning will appear in the paid app.

Llewellyn Smith says the premium app is but one piece of the Guardian’s “bigger jigsaw”. Its website home page remains “an incredibly powerful tool for us”, he says.

The Guardian is becoming less reliant on social media and has substantially changed its relationship with Facebook, which now accounts for less than 5% of the title’s digital traffic, a number that is continuing to fall following the paper’s abandonment of Facebook’s Instant Articles service last April.

The distancing from Facebook follows a stinging 2016 essay from Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, headlined ‘How Technology Disrupted the Truth’. In the op-ed, she outlined Facebook’s power over news and “the panic” among publishers over changes to its algorithm.

Llewellyn Smith reveals that The Guardian has now scrapped the Facebook Messenger-based Guardian Chatbot project it launched in November 2016 when the social platform was promoting chatbots as the new big thing. “We’re constantly trying things out,” he says. “After running it since late 2016 we made the decision to close our chatbot to focus more on engaging readers on our own platforms but we’ll continue to experiment in this area in line with our readers’ changing habits.”

With The Guardian still needing to spend with caution, he must identify technology that improves user experience rather than embracing fads. “We have got to be absolutely focused on the task in hand: trying to get to the point of break-even,” he says. “I’m much more interested in finding different ways of telling stories in the service of our readers than plucking the latest thing out of the air and saying everyone is talking about this.”

The Guardian has built a new in-house investigations tool, which is currently being deployed in several editorial projects. It experimented with virtual reality in the film ‘6×9’, which graphically demonstrated life in solitary confinement in the US prison system.

One week into the new changes to the paid app, Llewellyn Smith is “pretty pleased” with the initial response. Live is a rolling feed of every breaking news story as it happens. Discover is a deeper dive into pieces of analysis, reportage and indulgences such food recipes.

“The numbers of people using those two screens [Live and Discover] are pretty healthy,” he says. “Where we go next with them is interesting and I think maybe that click through on the Discover screen could be higher and that [could be] the area where you might think about some light degree of personalisation.”

It’s another indication of the Guardian’s digital audience splitting into two groups.

Much has been written about the bubble effect of social media algorithms and Llewellyn Smith says the Guardian would be “very hesitant” about personalising news content. But some users might appreciate a filtering out of sports content, or a more bespoke recipe service in their Discover feed.

“Maybe you only look at the vegetarian recipes because you are a good Guardian person, or – if you are a real Guardian reader – only the vegan ones, so we stop showing you Nigel Slater’s meat feast,” he jokes. “There are low levels of personalisation around features journalism that will be interesting to explore.”

Some Guardian stereotypes are real. When the paid app’s new Twitter-style Live feed was unveiled internally one admonishing member of the technology desk warned that the product could have an addictive quality and that the Guardian had criticised tech companies for seeking such user dependency. “It completely floored me,” says Llewellyn Smith. “I’d like to think that people would become addicted to The Guardian’s journalism.

“It’s only at The Guardian you would have got that question.”

By Ian Burrell

Covering the most powerful media companies to the smartest startups, former Independent media editor Ian Burrell examines the fraught problem of how news is funded today. Follow Ian @iburrell.

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Here’s how advertisers can navigate their way out of the programmatic maze

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By Ronan Shields

Marketers willing to undergo the complex process of taking their online ad spend in-house must prepare to unravel the complex web of contractual relationships, but potentially stand to benefit their wider operation’s financial health.

That’s the conclusion of a recent report by programmatic consultancy Labmatik which notes that the current in-house movement has been driven by a quest for improved operational efficiencies through decisions made outside of a marketing department.

“Too many programmatic marketers are suffering from unaccounted working media inefficiency, suboptimal operating models, and lack management systems to capture the purported benefits,” reads a note.

“Given the billions spent on programmatic ads, we hypothesized by asking: What do these nagging shortcomings cost the shareholders of big budget advertisers?”

In particular tier-one advertisers stand to gain from such audits, with Labmatik’s study using several big-spending advertisers such as Coca-Cola, General Motors plus Procter & Gamble as potential models for the success of such an exercise.

In a report foreword, Ari Paparo, Beeswax, chief executive officer, discusses how the wastage in the programmatic landscape is “being arbitraged out” as the market now enters “the transparency era”.

“It isn’t easy work. Driving out inefficiencies from your programmatic supply chain will probably take as much time as improving bid strategies, but both outcomes add value together,” he notes.

Tom Triscari, Labmatik, managing partner, says although the process of auditing a media supply chain is not without its pain points to ensure that their ad spend goes on actual working media, as opposed to otherwise anonymous third-parties, is a big win-win (see chart).

“Working media, for most large advertisers, is likely lower than most marketers know, have been told or want to believe,” he notes. “The second is because fixing the problem areas is easier than most marketers know, have been told or want to believe.”

The report reads: “We believe when advertisers convert their current supply chain into a unique proprietary system, they can deliver material incremental value to shareholders.”

In the study, Labmatik outlines a technique called “programmatic resource planning” as a means of better accounting for how their media budgets are allocated (see chart below).

As marketers embark on such a project, they also need to embark on a project of “programmatic cost accounting” it is also important to establish baseline measurements in order to calculate potential future savings. For this to be done successfully, it is important to decide which breakpoint to deploy and communicate to their stakeholders. These include:

  • Media budget
  • Available media budget (AMB)
  • Working media before arbitrage, supply and quality costs (WMBASQ)
  • Working media before supply and quality Costs (WMBSQ)
  • Working media before quality costs (WMBQ)
  • Fully-loaded working media (FLWM)

From here marketers should ask themselves some key questions, namely: how do I grow my spend, and how much by?

“From a pure programmatic accounting perspective, which is such an important subject matter for marketers and finance chiefs to understand together, the question becomes: Today I get some amount of reach or conversions with low working media,” says Triscari.

“If I manage to increase my working media by fixing my programmatic supply chain, I can now buy the same reach or conversions as before but with less media budget. What should I do with the cash difference? Keep spending the same as before or put the savings on the bottom line or somewhere in between?”

From here there are a number of potential operations models advertisers can choose to pursue (see chart).

After programmatic working media has been baselined, and the marketer has set a future working media goal aligned to an appropriate operating model, real cash savings can be calculated and captured. However, it is critical to note an important distinction between working media gains and real cash savings.

“For example, it is one thing to grow working media efficiency but still spend the same ad budget as before. It is another to treat the new efficiency as a way to reduce ad budget and pocket the surplus value creation,” reads the report.

The report goes on to document how advertisers can model their savings over a five-year period, and how that could potentially affect a large corporation’s bottom line.

The report contains an epilogue penned by Andrew Altersohn, AdFin, chief executive officer, it reads: “The path to improvement is through financial discipline and supply chain management.

“Marketers must now think like supply chain managers and assess the financial cost and benefits of each player, partner, tool, and technology.”

For a full free copy of Labmatik’s report click here

Feature Image: Successfully auditing a programmatic supply chain can result in tangible cost benefits for large corporations. / Pixabay

By Ronan Shields

Sourced from THEDRUM

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B2B marketers can do more to unlock the potential of their brands

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By Tom Pepper

The team here at LinkedIn recently celebrated ‘B2B in focus’ week, a few days dedicated to unearthing the latest trends and innovations in B2B marketing.

One of the things that really struck a chord with me was a panel discussion we hosted with Kantar Millward Brown, BrandZ, Hill & Knowlton and a number of leading marketers – Dean Aragon of Shell, Judith Everett from The Crown Estate, Ryan Miles from Microsoft and Annabel Venner of Hiscox – which discussed how marketers can unlock the potential of B2B brands. There was certainly a consensus among the panel that the B2B buying journey is rapidly changing. And as a result, marketers need to work harder than ever to create opportunities for their brands.

I wanted to share three key things I took away from the panel, which I think bring this challenge to light and – when applied correctly – should help all B2B marketers take their brand to new heights.

Be more human

The growing group of decision makers playing a part in any B2B buying cycle contributes to it being longer, more complex and even more emotional than most B2C journeys.

One area where B2B marketers could borrow from their B2C cousins, though, is better understanding and tapping into the emotional drivers of decision making. It’s impossible to do this if you don’t humanise your customer first, though.

During the session, Aragon raised the point that for marketers operating in the B2B space, it’s all too easy to forget that buyers and decision makers are human. I challenge you to find someone who defines themselves as “just” a 24/7 fleet manager or procurement director.

With a better understanding of their customers, beyond simply their job title, B2B marketers can humanise their brand and content in ways which will more likely drive action. It’s no easy task in B2B, where the buying committee could be the size of a small village, but it was a great reminder for everyone in the room about where to start with campaigns.

Embed purpose in all that you do

Knowing how to communicate effectively with prospects and customers on a human level is only one part of the jigsaw. Humans are hardwired to buy into something as much as they want to buy something. It’s no different when it comes to the B2B world.

As much as selling a product, B2B marketers need to communicate the wider purpose of their business and use it to drive both awareness and conversions. That purpose needs to be more than just a pet project or the idea of growing a conscience. It needs to be lived and breathed by any organisation every day.

During the session, Venner made this point by explaining how Hiscox has a strong set of values that have successfully guided and defined the business and are consistently communicated through all that they do. In essence, Hiscox aims to be there when stuff goes wrong – to be there quickly, first and make everything right.

Not every business will always have a purpose that means something worthy; the important thing is having something to stand for. What was clear from the session was that this needs to start from the inside out, with employees, otherwise it won’t last and no one will believe it.

Break the structural silos

Engaging customers on a person-to-person level and communicating your purpose boils down to getting closer to them. Marketing teams need to break out of their own confines and better align with other parts of the organisation.

In the session the panelists talked about creating agile teams and the need for closer sales and marketing alignment. While it’s a challenge – especially within larger organisations – building nimble, forward-looking teams is also a massive opportunity.

As well as circumventing unnecessary hierarchies, it automatically means marketing activity is in tune with business priorities and sales targets, enabling a much faster decision making process.

On a more practical level, I have seen first hand how the most successful B2B sales and marketing organisations are those which integrate both types of engagement seamlessly throughout the consideration stage, delivering the right type of interaction that’s most relevant at any given moment. For example, thought leadership content from the marketing team has the potential to short-circuit the traditional buyer journey and lead directly to the award of the business.

For today’s B2B marketer, taking a broad brush approach and simply replicating the B2C buying experience is not an option. B2B marketers need to forge their own path, use technology to automate the process where they can but ensure they have purpose at the heart of their business and communicate it in a human way.

By Tom Pepper

Tom Pepper is head of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions UK

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Only 1% of Brits say they’re more likely to use brands sponsoring the World Cup

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By John McCarthy

Oath has studied the viewing habits of World Cup fans to deliver ad insight to its clients, and in doing so, it learned about brand recognition levels in the UK – and a staggeringly low purchase intent.

In February, 7,294 respondents from UK, France, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Spain gave their views on sponsors. For Coca-Cola retention levels were at 45%, at McDonalds it was 41%, Adidas (33%), Visa (31%) and Budweiser (27%).

Brazilians were found to be the most passionate fans, but they were also the most brand-friendly. 35% said they would be much more interested in using a brand that sponsors the World Cup tournament, in the UK, this figure slips to just 1%

Furthermore, one in four (26%) people in the UK said they would not support any other team in the football tournament should their team leave the contest. Stepping aside from the data, Scots have a habit of supporting any team playing England. It was the subject of a Paddy Power ad at Euro 2016.

The study also uncapped consumption habits. Three in four (75%) viewers will be watching at home on TV, as opposed to just 1% on mobile, However, nearly one in four (23%) will leverage smartphones as part of a multi-screen experience.

On the features fans expect, 33% wanted on-demand replays, 18% were keen on 360° virtual reality stadium tours, and 15% wanted to see tabletop AR football.

Stuart Flint, vice president EMEA at Oath, said: “Brands only have a small window where they can grab consumers’ attention while games are on, so they need to look beyond matches and engage fans seeking out supplementary information including stats, replays and interactive experiences.

“While some British fans will switch off from TV once their team is out of the running, they’re still likely to be keeping tabs on contextually relevant content throughout the competition.”

37% in the UK claimed they won’t be engaged in World Cup tournament until the first game kicks off.

By John McCarthy

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Plastic fantastic: should brands rethink their response to the packaging witch hunt?

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By Katie Deighton

Consumer outcry surrounding the global overuse of plastics has caused multitudes of FMCG, retail and food companies to rapidly readdresses their packaging strategies. But is the drastic jettisoning of PET plastic really the best route for brands to take?

If David Attenborough is the prophet of the anti-plastic generation, Chris Griffin is the pragmatist. As multinationals from Evian to Adidas scramble to reduce the amount of plastic in their supply chains in response to consumer outcry, the chief executive of the Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising is quietly cynical with regards to brands’ efforts.

“From the consumer’s point of view, the plastic debate is so complex that I don’t think they can engage in anything other than the top line soundbite,” he says. “The consumer is going to be fed many lines – like ‘we’re going to make all our new bottles out of sugar cane’ or something. That’s probably not going to happen worldwide on the scale of a global brand.”

The reason, Griffin believes, is because product lifecycles are complicated. Designers spend years understanding the end-to-end process of packaging – from conception to burial in either landfill or recycling plant – and therefore the choice of whether or not to use plastic should not be one made by a PR department.

“Brands have to be very careful not to respond too quickly to media pressure,” he says. “If they say … ‘We’re going to go for all sugar cane-based packaging’, that’s going to be dangerous for them because they won’t be able to deliver it.

“What might work as a comment this year, could get them in trouble next year.”

Yet there’s no doubt the pressure on brands to do something about the amount of plastic they produce is enormous. Last month saw a brigade of passionate, if not militant, protestors launch a ‘plastic attack’ on a Tesco store in Bath (they ripped off wrapping and left it dumped at the tills), ‘reduce plastic waste’ brings up 38m+ results on Google and online vitriol spun towards Whole Foods over selling orange segments in plastic boxes caused the retailer to pull the product almost instantly.

Since David Attenborough urged humanity to halt plastic use in order to save ocean ecosystems in Blue Planet II, the list of brands promising to reduce or jettison plastic from their packaging has extended exponentially. Commercial pressure has given plastic a bad name – but that’s not entirely a good thing, argues Griffin. Plastics, after all, evolved with and as part of the notion of the 20th century brand.

“Plastics do some incredible things: preserving by using the absolute minimal amount of material,” he explains. “The moldability, the formability … you can get shape and character, you can get brand attributes into your packs.”

The Museum of Brands’ Pack The Future

Griffin’s appreciation for the material is slightly ironic considering his museum has launched an exhibition dedicated to sustainable and, largely, plastic-free packaging. Yet his favourite exhibit is of two cucumbers, one wrapped in plastic and one naked: while the green skin of the cucumber is cited by many anti-packaging activists as natural packaging, it’s the unwrapped fruit that goes mouldy first.

“The energy that goes into food production is phenomenal,” Griffin says. “And if we don’t get it from the field to the plate because it’s wasted [because of a lack of packaging], that’s a huge waste of energy.”

A similar argument was made by The Genuine Coconut Company when it was lambasted for wrapping its coconuts in film; its retort was the packaging helps the milk stay fresh for longer, and plastic is fully recyclable. Additionally, disability campaigners have defended the accessibility of pre-chopped and wrapped vegetables, which have also been much maligned since the Blue Planet II episode aired.

A food industry without plastic may then be unobtainable – or even undesirable, at least for the time being. But as countries such as the UK continue to wait for a comprehensive national recycling system, it’s brands that are leading the charge in researching sustainable solutions. Unilever announced last week (4 April), for example, that it’s collaborating with Dutch startup Ioniqa, which has developed a technology to break down PET plastic to a molecular level.

“That means we can take any type of PET waste, then break it down to remove colour and impurities,” said Sanjeev Das, the conglomerate’s global packaging director, in a statement. “We can then turn it back into pure, clean, transparent PET plastic that’s food-grade ready.”

Coca-Cola has promised to help collect and recycle a bottle or can for every container that it sells by 2030, alongside aiming to manufacture plastic containers with 50% recycled content by the same date. On a smaller scale, rival P&G is working with the recycling company Terracycle to manufacture Head & Shoulders bottles made partially of plastic washed up on beaches and waterways.

Interestingly, Terracycle has found gaining support from big multinationals, such as P&G, to have been easier than garnering it from the NGOs it relies on to collect the beach plastic.

“P&G wanted to do something sustainable, something to make a difference,” explains Stephen Clarke, head of communications at Terracycle Europe. “And although there’s quite a lot of work to get buy in from various departments from within a company, our biggest problem was actually getting the NGOs to buy into it. It’s getting them to do something different.”

While the FMCG multinationals (which have budget and scale on their side) lead on recycling innovation, Griffin sees potential in the luxury sector when it comes to the development of sustainable plastic alternatives.

“As a designer, some sustainable materials are just fabulous to work with,” he says. “Corrugated cardboard looks beautiful, materials come from crustaceans have fabulous textures and some [materials] that come from various plant materials are wonderful to work with and wonderful to design with. But they’re not on the scale that will be economical for volume. So I think luxury’s a whole new area where sustainable thinking is necessary.”

The potential for luxury, sustainable packaging to double as a proof point for the wider industry is a sentiment shared by a number of design houses.

“As with any aspirational market, the luxury packaging sector is a platform for materials and innovations to be revealed and translated into other areas,” says Toby Wilson, chief operating officer at MW Luxury Packaging. “Naturally, the more a new technology, technique or material is used, the more accessible it becomes.”

However Wilson is cognisant that the luxury sector has, thus far, been immune to the pressures of sustainable packaging due to the assumed long lifespan of its products. A consumer is more likely to keep and reuse a beautiful Fortnum & Mason chocolate box, for instance, than a Milk Tray.

“But this is changing,” he says. “Quality and brand aspiration is critical and therefore innovation in high quality and high-performance materials is essential. Materials that perform and present need to be developed to maintain the luxury credibility that a brand demands.

“This will come through innovation and material development.”

Progress Packaging’s totes for Tom Dixon featured natural canvas wrapped in a clear biodegradable bag

The current trend for minimalism (little to no branding on packaging) in the luxury sector has also meant for easier experimentation with avant-garde, sustainable materials, says Victoria Walmsley, media developer at Progress Packaging. The agency has been working with recycled cottons, canvas and hessian, as well as corrugated board and recycled boards.

“There is definitely a strong wave of encouragement [for more sustainable materials] that comes from designers, manufacturers, and the consumers, too,” she says. “We do see more enquiries asking us how they can make things pretty but also reusable. I think reusability once a product has been opened is the key requirement. The market doesn’t just want to provide bags and boxes that will get used once and then thrown away anymore.”

Yet environmental charities, quite understandably, aren’t ready to rest the future of the world’s oceans on the luxury sector’s ability to innovate alternatives to plastic. For Julian Kirby, lead plastic-free campaigner at Friends of the Earth, the onus is on a number of actors to make change.

“Currently the companies that make and market packaging only contribute about 10% of the costs of collecting and processing it, meaning the remaining 90% is borne by tax payers through cash-strapped local authorities,” he says. “A mix of sectors working together could rapidly provide answers we need to the plastic pollution crisis, with big companies having the power to make alternatives to plastic the mainstream choice.

“However, for this change to come about on a mass corporate scale we need central government action.”

By Katie Deighton

Sourced from THE DRUM

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Asos lauds effect of Instagram Stories as it reduces marketing spend

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By Jennifer Faull

Asos has singled out the performance of Instagram Stories in its marketing mix, saying the number of people viewing its content on the platform has almost doubled in just six months.

The online retailer today (11 April) reported stellar sales for the six months to 28 February, noting a 10% rise in half-year profits to £29.9m as sales jumped 27% to £1.13bn compared with the same period in the previous year.

On a call with analysts, chief executive Nick Beighton praised the Instagram-effect, saying the Facebook-owned platform was now more popular among its core 20-something customer base than Facebook and as such the business had maintained its investment in its “relevant, emerging content formats” including Stories.

The brand’s content on the site was viewed over 30m times while videos were viewed more than 52m times, up from 40m in the previous half of the year.

Asos was one of the first to experiment with Stories ad formats when it launched last January and has become a brand that many benchmark against when it comes to successfully harnessing the Facebook-owned app’s offering, with Instagram itself using the retailer’s strategy as a case study in order to lure other brands to the platform.

“When we recognise technology that can help our business, we fold in pretty quick,” Beighton said.

Now that its convinced on the value of Stories, the current tool under the spotlight is Instagram’s shopping-enabled adverts, which launched widely at the beginning of this year.

“On one level [Instagram Shopping] could turbo charge the experience for 20-somethings but on another level it could be a real threat,” admitted Beighton.

“We do know Instagram is one of the biggest channels for our customers, it’s much bigger than Facebook, so I’d go with the positive and think about how we can make it more intuitive and friction free for our customers.”

Its experiments on the digital channel come amid a wider review of its marketing costs. It didn’t give an exact figure but as a percentage of sales it stood at 5% versus 5.3% in the previous period. The savings were made as a result of “digital marketing efficiencies and a higher return on advertising spend,” said Beighton.

Though admitting the brand is on “every conceivable marketing channel”, Beighton said it is venturing offline, especially in other European markets. In the UK it ran its first out of home campaign to launch its Face and Body and Activewear lines while in France it took to TV and cinema for the first time with promising results.

“The combination of TV and cinema aren’t immediately relevant to the 20-something market in the UK but they are in the French market. But it’s an experiment,” he said.

In the US meanwhile, its PPC ad spend is under scrutiny with Beighton saying the rates “are up pretty dramatically” on various terms, though he didn’t go into detail on how it would mitigate that cost.

Overall, he said continued investments are enabling strong engagement levels across its customer base. Site visits increased by 25% year-on-year; average order frequency improved by 8%; average basket value increased by 2% alongside a 10 base point improvement in conversion.

Active customers are now at 16.5 million, representing a 17% increase since last year.

By Jennifer Faull

Sourced from THE DRUM

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Coca-Cola is breaking the agency model to experiment with crowd-sourced creative briefs

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By Katie Deighton

Coca-Cola’s latest experiment in opening short design briefs to the entire world illustrates its plans to no longer be seen as “a traditional advertiser” by appointing consumers – not agencies – as its co-creators.

The drinks giant’s head of digital, David Godsman, admitted at the Adobe Summit opening keynote that the digitally connected world is “somewhat unknown” to the brand. Nevertheless, 12 months ago it embarked on a five-year digital transformation programme, underscored by four key areas: operations, business, culture and experiences.

Surprisingly, Coca-Cola has filed its marketing and advertising operations into the latter category. Not only is Godsman asking his “traditional brand marketers to become experience makers”, but he’s earmarked the fans of Coca-Cola as vital to its content creation strategy.

David Godsman, chief digital officer, Coca-Cola

“Digital allows us to create unifying experiences which – regardless of language or place in the world – helps to bring them together,” he said. “Digital enables them to participate actively with us and co-create the experiences we bring to market

“We don’t see a world where we will continue as a traditional advertiser in that sense.”

James Sommerville, Coca-Cola’s vice president of global design, introduced one of the first forays into this strategy of consumers-as-creators. Coke x Adobe x You, which quietly launched last October on social media, comprised a succinct brief open to the entire internet, which read: ‘Create a work of art celebrating Coca-Cola, sport, movement, strength, and unity using Adobe Creative Cloud tools’.

“We thought: ‘What would happen if you just gave the world’s designers three or four simple tools and a short brief – so short that you could tweet it?’,” explained Sommerville.

The brief for Coke x Adobe x You

So far, the project has thrown up around 1,500 submissions, from trippy, fun animations to meticulous hand-drawn illustrations. All the designers were commissioned to feature the red Coca-Cola circle, while Adobe and Coca-Cola kept the Tokyo Olympics 2020 under wraps.

“If you scan these pages you’ll see the enthusiasm to work on our products and our brand,” said Sommerville, adding that the project “really is the start of our journey”.

The brand is arguably in need of a revived creative strategy. Diet Coke’s latest offerings have failed to capture the mass imagination that 1995’s ‘Diet Coke Break’ managed to, for instance, while ‘Because I Can’ was pretty much panned creatively.

It’s unlikely that Coca-Cola will eschew working with creative agencies for consumer creations altogether. Sommerville stressed that “we love our agencies partners, we need our agency partners”, but he also loves to “discover the hidden gems”. By that he means freelance artists such as Noma Bar, the graphic designers going viral, or “some guy working in Starbucks right now on a laptop”.

Noma Bar for Coca-Cola

But when conglomerate does come looking for agencies in the future, it may start knocking on other doors. Sommerville’s design lab is currently experimenting with prototypes such as a fountain that dispenses mobile data in lieu of soft drinks – the kind of project that will certainly require the expertise of creative technologists, but perhaps not those of traditional creatives.

“I really want to invite the creative community to reimagine the whole experience,” said the Atlanta-based, Huddersfield-born designer. “Everyone in this room, everyone on this planet, has the right to work with Coca-Cola.”

How does he plan on keeping those divergent, global ideas tied to a common brand idea? By looking back on the vast history of Coca-Cola.

“We have a little phrase called Kiss the Past Hello,” he explained. “A lot of people talk about failing fast – for us this is the Coca-Cola way of saying a very similar thing. Our past is so important to us. It educates us. The good, the bad, what worked, what didn’t.

“Those stories are the same, but the context has changed. We are about technology, we are about transformation and we are about talent. But ultimately for us the experience starts at the product – it’s the texture, it’s the touch of the glass, it’s the temperature.”

By Katie Deighton

Sourced from THEDRUM

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A work of non-friction: is Amazon rewriting the retail rule book?

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By Rebecca Stewart

After disrupting many traditional sectors through its online presence, Amazon is now stepping into physical spaces, with tangible results. The Drum looks at how the brand is rewriting the rule book, most notably with retailer Whole Foods and its own Amazon Go store concept.

When Amazon launched in 1994 it declared itself to be ‘Earth’s Biggest Bookstore’. Almost 25 years later, the strapline feels laughably out of step with the money-making juggernaut it has become.

However Amazon has, throughout its lifecycle, remained true to its roots as a purveyor of paperbacks, going on to disrupt the category with the Kindle e-reader and self-publishing services.

And amid something of a bibliophile renaissance, Amazon is going back to basics.

Last year it announced plans to open a bricks-and-mortar bookstore in Manhattan. Meanwhile, its own physical imprint has in the past few months launched a division dedicated to short fiction reads.

Amazon is also taking a back to the future approach to retail. Its now-famed checkout-free Amazon Go opened recently to shoppers in Seattle, and the company has a network of Whole Foods stores throughout Canada, the US and UK.

Omnichannel experiences

“Amazon is coming at these industries from a position of no baggage,” muses Teaque Lenahan, regional director of business design and strategy at Fjord Seattle.

“Digitally native companies such as Amazon already know how to interact with consumers in that context, so in many ways it is an easier play for them to shape this digitally enabled, physical experience, than it is for traditional bricks-and-mortar players.”

Publishers in particular are likely to find themselves caught between the draw of a mutually beneficial relationship with Amazon and the memory of the disastrous impact that bringing sales online had on stores like the now defunct Borders.

Cory Cruser, experience innovation partner at creative consultancy Lippincott, argues that Amazon is not so much moving into the industries it helped kill, but rather shaping future behavior.

“With behavior changes come new ways to create value for customers, and reinterpreting traditional models is one way to do that, improving them in line with the behavior shift.”

Too much influence?

Aydin Moghaddam, head of PPC at digital agency Roast, laments the lack of competition Amazon asserting its dominance in these areas would bring about.

“Amazon has too much influence, and there cannot be perfect competition when one company has that,” he says.

Fjord’s Lenahan, meanwhile, is more pragmatic. “At the moment, Amazon’s foray into the physical market is either primarily for customer learning, or not yet scalable,” he says.

What’s next?

For Simon Law, chief strategy officer at WPP agency Possible, there is no irony in its forays into physical retail.

“It’s brilliant. The company has more than $22bn in cash and is using it to explore what the future looks like and how to keep retail innovating. It is investing in the new, the different and the explorative. It is doing what all business that are in decline failed to do.”

As for what’s next, Moghaddam predicts Amazon will acquire a fashion retailer, while Lenahan notes that as Amazon could trade on transparency to make money in the media arena.

For Cruser, it’s finance. “The industry ripe for massive disruption is banking, simply because the systems in this industry have not kept pace with the changing nature of our relationship with money,” he says.

Whatever happens, the company that started out as the world’s biggest bookseller is rewriting the rule book when it comes to disruption.

You can read the rest of this article in the April issue of The Drum magazine, which for the first time ever is devoted to a single company – Amazon. In it we explore why the company is becoming an increasingly attractive proposition to advertisers, and look at the increasing threat it poses to legacy brands operating in the spaces it might target next.

By Rebecca Stewart

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Is it time to reposition positioning?

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By Neil Simpson

Quick! What’s the difference between a positioning statement and set of brand values?

Or a value proposition and a brand’s DNA?

What about a brand promise and a brand essence?

If you answered ‘er’ to any of the above, then you are not alone.

Week long workshops have been spent parsing out the distinctions between ‘DNA’ and ‘purpose’. Cut through the froth, however, and we are talking about positioning.

But whatever we call it, positioning is central to what marketers do. Yet, here’s a scary New Year’s thought: is it time to reposition positioning?

When Ries and Trout first proclaimed the arrival of positioning in the late 1960s and early 70s, simplicity was at the heart of their thinking. ‘Positioning compensates for our over-communicated society by using an oversimplified message to cut through the clutter and get into the mind.’

Positioning was a strategic exercise, informing everything from distribution, to product innovation, and marketing communications. By analyzing competition, consumer, and company in question, brands could clearly define themselves against rivals with a strong positioning. Ultimately it was about ‘where’ and ‘how’ a brand should ‘play’ against competition.

As a result, the primary goal of the advertising agency morphed from (tactical) creativity, for its own sake, into the (strategic) management of brands.

Yet, as the synonymic inflation around the word ‘positioning’ suggests, this has become an increasingly complex exercise, cast adrift from the original intent.

We now spend a great deal of time ruminating over the finer points of brand personalities, or carefully delving into semantic nuances. We build pyramids, diamonds, and peel back layers of brand onions (weeping, often, in the process), while flicking through thesauruses for synonyms of ‘inspirational’.

More worryingly, positioning is increasingly detached from its original strategic intent. It has become too concerned with marketing communications, and is often treated as a story which should be told (directly) to the consumer. This is a long way from what it should be. Moore and Helstein in a 2007 article on positioning tersely noted ‘a positioning statement is not an advertising strategy, a slogan, or a tagline. It is an internal document, and is often very dull and straightforward.’

The lack of strategic thought is also evident when it comes to understanding of the competition. Competitor analysis is all too often overlooked, and palmed off on someone more junior, with the results filed away and never used. This leads to the weird sense of déjà vu between a lot of brand executions, born, one suspects, from positionings that didn’t pay attention to, or distinguish themselves from, the competition.

All this distracts from an exercise that was originally intended to focus strategy. Positionings have become a pick-and-mix of Big Words that agencies often struggle to execute against.

And positioning faces an even bigger challenge. Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has pointed out that the way we think about positioning is back to front.

Unlike marketers, the brand is the last thing consumers think about.

For consumers, brands are not the fixed platonic ideals that brand onions suggest they are. Instead they are a mess of mental cues, recalled to solve certain problems throughout the day.

Romaniuk refers to these situations that induce brand recall as ‘category entry points’ (CEPs).

For example, you might feel hungry at lunchtime (CEP) and several brands will pop into your head to solve this problem.

You might need a mid-afternoon pick me up (CEP) and Starbucks, Coca-Cola, or the godawful stuff in the canteen might mentally appear.

CEPs can be linked to things like hunger, the time of day, a sporting event, or a type of weather. This makes sense because brand considerations are context specific, and different contexts – or CEPs – evoke different brand options. (If you are considering lunch you might not be considering Burger King. But, if it’s 3am, or the morning after the night before, it might be at the top of your mind.)

This is a big challenge to traditional positioning and the 3Cs that inform it.

After all the consumer (or at least consumer mindset) varies depending on the situation. The competition varies too. If you’re Coca-Cola you might be competing with a coffee mid-afternoon, and a beer at 6pm.

And the brand itself is perceived differently in each situation. It’s not, in other words a ‘fixed’ idea. (That’s why it makes little sense to ask consumers what situations come to mind for specific brands – the answer is it depends on the situation. We should instead be asking what brands come to mind for certain situations.)

In short, different CEPs should logically produce different positionings.

So how do we adapt?

For a start, it should prompt marketers to consider what CEPs they are currently linked to, and if they should expand this number. The most successful brands are linked to wide a range of different situations, and smart brands actively seek to expand them. A simple example of how this works is from McDonalds, which went from simply answering a ‘fast food’ situation, to also answering a quick and easy way to get breakfast and a decent coffee.

We should therefore not be afraid of embracing positioning(s) plural. This does not mean that every brand should document a bewildering array of every potential CEP, and position against each. Some CEPs are more common (and profitable) than others. CEPs also seem to have practical limits. Fizzy drinks or fast food chains might have quite a few, but realistically how many does toilet roll really have?

All this suggests that positioning should cease to be the distant, lofty, and totemic PowerPoint it often feels like today. It was, after all, originally intended as a battle plan, rather than a religious text. Positioning should once again act as a practical and powerful tool to help focus thinking, and compete with the competition across (a range of) different consumer cues.

That positioning often feels more like an exercise in semantic acrobatics or character creation suggests it’s long-overdue a repositioning.

By Neil Simpson

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